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As a Horror writer I've been often and pointedly been asked whyI write this stuff. It's not ever said directly, but it's alwaysthere: Is there something wrong with you? In my own defense,quite a few people enjoy reading this same stuff and even moreget a thrill out of watching it on the big screen. Just tohazard a guess, I'd say most people have in their life read ahorror book or seen a horror movie. The question then becomes:What's wrong with us?

My first occasions to hear horror stories was as a child inchurch. I was told that there was a man in a red suit and hornswho carried a pitchfork and watched everything I did and wantedto send me to the worst, most horrible place ever if I did badthings. Worse than this, I was told that there was somethingcalled 'original sin' and just by being born I was on God's craplist and if I didn't repent for things I'd never done, the manin the red suit would still get me. It didn't seem quite fair tome that my little three year old wrong-doings could earn me thesame trip to Hell that someone like Hitler got.

I was scared constantly. And that was the point of thosestories, to scare little boys into behaving as their parentswanted them to.

Fairy tales have the same theme: Obey your parents, or badthings will happen. I can't swear that I remember all of myfairy tales, but I do remember as a child being - probably -unreasonably worried about being eaten. For the time, beingeaten seemed about the worst thing that could happen to me and Ilooked warily at strangers trying to evaluate in my mind whetherthey would try and eat me. Fortunately, there were very fewcannibals in Wisconsin at that time. Jeffrey Dahmer was one, butfor the life of me, I can't think of any other Wisconsincannibals. Oh, wait. Ed Gein - but that's it.

Parents frightening their kids is one thing, but why do peoplewant to scare themselves? Did you ever wonder why you paid goodmoney at the bookstore and at the movies for this service thatyour parents would happily provide you for free? Well, horrorstories are about fear, but it's not just about making yourselfscared - that alone is no fun. Horror stories are aboutconquering your fear, and the way they do that is symbolicallyby creating a monster that represents a fear and by having thatmonster defeated. Thus it helps you to overcome yoursubconscious fear/Monster by identifying with the destruction ofthe one in the story. Works out pretty neat, huh?

Here's how it plays out in a few familiar scenarios.Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, was thought to the first realscience fiction book, although it really is a horror story. Inthe story Victor Frankenstein discovers the secret of life -itself! As an experiment he creates for himself a man sewntogether from cadavers and then embues it with life, and thenseeing what an awful looking creature he's created, he abandonsit. He does this because it looks so hideous, though for thelife of me, I can't figure out why he had to make the thing outof several icky corpses instead of just finding one beautifulone and giving that one life. Anyways, the monster runs away andthen comes back to haunt him and he has to destroy it.

The explanation for Frankenstein is that the monster representsscience and the Victorian fear that science and progress hadgone too far. Science, once the obedient servant of mankind,had, like Frankenstein's monster, broken free and turned againstits master - us. A hundred or years later this same theme isechoed in the movie The Terminator, only this time the sciencethat breaks free is computer science. Computers, our formerlydocile servant, turn against us and band together to become onegiant warlike mind which for some reason or other decides thatall humans must perish throughout time. I guess we had it comingto us.

Vampires, another popular monster, have represented the onceprevalent infectious disease that used to regularly wipe outgiant swathes of human population. In modern times, Vampireshave been reinterpeted to be kind of sexy, that is, theyrepresent the dark sexual impulses people have inside themselvesthat they also think may destroy them. Vampire stories, then,become our victory over our dark, forbidden desires. Which arerepresented by those sexy, sexy vampires.

Sex is a constant theme in the slasher movies. The Scream moviesbrilliantly satirize this by having the teen-agers in the movieaware of the conventions of the genre they are living through,yet helpless to change them as those conventions become theirfates. In the slasher movies young girls fear of their ownsexual maturity is confronted symbolically by the slasher whorepresents teen-age boys through the menace of wielding the veryFreudian penis/knife. You'll notice that the heroine thatinevitably prevails in these movies is the virgin who neversuccombs to the temptation of sex and not coincidentally, doesnot succomb to the slasher, either.

My favorite monsters are the ones from the Japanese monstermovies, Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan and, of course, Monster Zero.The reason I love these monsters is that they are politicalmonsters. Think about it: Godzilla is a giant, super-powerfulradioactive monster who comes from over the sea who is createdby radioactivity and then attacks Japan with that sameradioactivity. Sound familiar? (Hint: It's America). All thesemonsters from overseas are constantly attacking Japan and beingbeaten up by the cohesion of the Japanese people.

Now, the obvious question for me - being a horror writer and all- is: What are the symbolic monsters in my book, Breakfast withthe Antichrist?

Well ... I'm not telling

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com - Monsters from the Subconscious